I don’t use a lot of kitchen gadgets. I have a couple appliances which I use regularly — like the ancient rice cooker and my big stand mixer — but otherwise, when I need to chop things I get out a knife, and when I need to stir things, I get out a whisk. Most gadgets just seem to take up too much room in the drawer or be too finicky to clean easily. For a long time I even resisted buying a cherry pitter, but that five dollar purchase has more than paid for itself and the cherry pitter doesn’t get in my way the fifty weeks of the year I don’t use it.
I can’t remember now who gave us the salad dressing mixer and garlic chopper — whether it was Santa or my brother-in-law (who are not much different in my sons’ eyes) — but these two gadgets have been immediately, happily adopted by my sons. Ben just loves a gadget, and Eli thinks they make the kitchen more “modern.” I am happy that these two (small, easy to clean) devices have the boys back in the kitchen, experimenting with various combinations of ingredients and inventing new dressings each day. Last night, Eli mashed raspberries into his vinaigrette (yes, I even bought terribly unseasonal berries to support his dressing habit; tomorrow we’ll try pomegranate juice). The only problem now is the boys’ competition to use the dressing mixer every day — and the volume of dressing they are producing. But these are not problems I’m going to complain about too much, yet. For now, I like having these young scientists back in the kitchen with me.
If you ask my kids, they will tell you their favorite restaurant is the Melting Pot, a chain of fondue restaurants. Everything I wrote almost exactly one year ago remains true. Yet in spite of the price, we have eaten there three times this year. We didn’t anticipate that our promise to celebrate certain accomplishments would become such an expensive one.
So, Santa thought it was time to leave a fondue pot for the family, which we used almost immediately to inaugurate a new tradition: New Years Eve Fondue.
We all helped prep: cutting bread and dipping vegetables and apples and setting them on the table on small bowls. grating cheese in the food processor; chopping and measuring the aromatics and liquid; covering the table in butcher paper and then setting it.
Everything ready to go
We have the Cuisnart electric fondue pot, so when everything was prepped, we brought the ingredients right to the table to cook. The pot gets up to temperature almost immediately, so if you have your prep under control, this is a very fast dinner, one you could even do on a busy weeknight. The fondue comes together in less than ten minutes, even if you make, like we did, enough fondue to feed a small regiment of Swiss gendarmes.
We took turns with the cooking: I sauteed the garlic, kids added the beer, then we all added handfuls of cheese, the aromatics, and stirred until the fondue came together.
Then we ate.
It was one of the most pleasant, easy meals we’ve had this season. I reckon we’ll save about $600 a year in restaurant bills. There’s something about cooking together over a single pot, then eating out of a communal bowl that brings our family together in the way no other meal can. (True, the sticks help.) I think the next time an ugly conflict rears it’s head, or I need a good bribe reward, I might suggest fondue for dinner and all will be well. Really, it’s like family therapy.
Horseradish Cheddar Fondue
Makes enough for at least 8 hungry people, so adjust accordingly. Follow the directions on your fondue pot for cooking and warming.
1 1/2 lbs mild cheddar cheese, shredded
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 1/2 cups beer (we like Stella Artois)
1 tablespoon butter
1 minced clove garlic
1 teaspoon horseradish mustard
1-2 dashes tabasco
Ideas for dipping:
bread cubes
carrots
broccoli (lightly steamed if you prefer)
mild pre-cooked sausage
fennel and/or celery
apple wedges, cut in half
Toss shredded cheese with corn starch and set aside.
by Caroline
For a family that cooks and cares about food as much as we do, it was unsettling to face our lack of Christmas dinner traditions. I could happily sit down to a meal of Tony’s grandmother’s lemon-parsley stuffing, Tony’s porcini mushroom gravy (lately infused with his late father’s 1981 port), and some cranberry sauce. Yes, it’s clear we have family foods, but not, like Lisa’s family, a traditional menu we anticipate each year.
So I was a bit surprised when Eli, after bounding down the hall and into our bed Christmas Eve morning, said “This dinner is going to be my favorite!” Tony asked, “What are you looking forward to most?” And Eli responded, “Christmas after it!”
Well, who can blame him? And when I asked what he wanted for dinner, he listed stuffing and gravy, so that’s pretty much what we ate (oh, and some brussels sprouts and chard and caramelized onions and roast potatoes… but that’s another story). For dessert, I was planning just to offer up a plate of Christmas cookies, but this is where Eli had a specific idea: raspberry pie.
Ben, by then cuddled in bed with us, too, and thoroughly steeped in the contemporary food ethos, worried, “Are raspberries in season?”
No, but raspberry jam is always in season, and we even had some homemade jam made by a friend. Raspberry jam tart it was.
I poked around online awhile and took most of my inspiration from David Lebovitz’s recipe but I had cold butter, not soft (and didn’t see the point in softening butter only to refrigerate the resulting tart dough until cold enough to use). So I pulled my Joy of Cooking off the shelf and followed Irma’s lead. I did borrow Lebovitz’s idea of reserving some of the dough to make an easy top crust, though instead of rolling it into a log, chilling and slicing it, as he does, I pressed mine flat and cut out some Christmasy stars. I predict you’ll see this tart on my table again at Valentine’s Day, topped with some hearts.
This recipe makes enough dough for an 8″ tart (bottom crust and top decorations); if you have a bigger tart pan, it’s easy to scale up.
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 teaspoon grated lemon zest
1/4 teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons of cold unsalted butter, cut into pieces
1 large egg yolk
1 1/2 cups of raspberry jam
1-2 tablespoons of coarse-grained sugar
Preheat the oven to 400.
Butter and flour the bottom of an 8″ tart pan with a removable bottom.
Whisk the flour, sugar, salt, and lemon zest together in a bowl or in the food processor. Add the butter and work in with a fork or pulse in the food processor until the mixture makes coarse crumbs. Add the egg yolk and mix until the dough just starts to come together in a ball.
Reserving about 1/3 cup of dough for the topping, pat most of the dough evenly into the bottom of the tart pan, letting it come up the sides a little bit. Spread with jam. Set aside momentarily while you make the topping.
Taking the reserved dough, press or roll it out on a floured counter or between sheets of wax paper until it’s about 1/4″ thick. Cut into desired shapes, freehand or using cookie cutters. Arrange the shapes on top of the jam, sprinkle them with the coarse-grained sugar, and bake until the crust is golden and the jam is bubbling a bit, 20-25 minutes.
olive pits and rice: the remains of dinner
A friend of mine is currently waiting patiently for the birth of her second son, “due” two days ago but taking his own sweet time to arrive into this world. And her waiting has me thinking about all the ways in which our children never quite do what we expect them to do, when we expect them to do so.
My older son, Ben, is 9 and a half. For the first couple years of his food-eating life, he ate whatever we put in front of him: eggplant caviar. Goat cheese. Pickled daikon. Chard lasagne. And then bit by bit, he started dropping foods from his diet. It didn’t happen when he started school, as many predicted, but it happened obviously enough that I began to think of him as a picky eater. An unusual picky eater, to be sure; he ate chard and pickled things and bitter marmalade, but no melted cheese (hardly any cheese at all), no milk except a bit to wet his cereal, no tomatoes. Birthday parties, with their ubiquitous cheese pizzas, became difficult. Eating out wasn’t so easy, either. And at home, despite our best intentions to keep cooking the foods we like and waiting for the kids to come around, we found ourselves subtly adapting our cooking to our kid’s appetite, or making modular meals of something new (a different kind of green, squash cooked a new way) topping something familiar (rice or pasta). We have fallen into ruts, and then needed to climb out of them. We get excited about new foods and then exhausted by the problem of needing to make dinner every single night.
But this week we’re on vacation. Even though you never get a real vacation from parenting, we’re all feeling relaxed, spending longer over meals, being a little more casual about breakfast for dinner or eating out. Plus, we’re getting excited about planning our summer adventure with friends: ten days in Turkey! Eli is poring over the brochure for the rental house; Ben wonders aloud what might be growing in the garden in August. Tony has wisely researched Turkish restaurants in San Francisco and last night we went to one. After studying the menu a while, Ben asked for an order of olives (marinated in herbs and citrus); we rounded out his dinner by ordering up a buffet of mezze: hummus, muhammara, haydari, falafel and zucchini cakes. We ordered extra pita and a rice pilaf, just in case.
The olives and pita were a hit. Ben picked delicately at the falafel and took a proper bite of zucchini cake. He scowled, but then said he liked the after taste. Not enough to eat more right then, but enough to try it again. We’ve all agreed to eat Turkish food once a month until we go on our big trip, and to try something new each time we do. They may still subsist on pita when we travel, but we’ll try to familiarize them a bit with the (fabulous, delicious) range of options. We had a great conversation over the meal, so even though I think my children really only ate olives, pita, and a bit of rice for dinner, the memory of the meal is a happy one, and — I hope — bodes well for our summer travels.
So, I think, does this: Midway through the meal, Ben pulled the bay leaf out of his olives and ate it. I didn’t notice until afterwards, when he said, “That leaf on the olives is really bitter!”
“That’s a bay leaf, Ben,” I answered, “It flavors the food, but you’re not really meant to eat it.”
“Oh, well, maybe it’ll flavor my water.” And with that, he stuck the bay leaf in his water and drank it down.
This weekend we went to a holiday party where a friend was mixing a drink he calls The Grinch, which really is anything but (unless maybe you’re around the person who drank them the day after…)
A Grinch is basically a Grasshoppper made with vanilla ice cream instead of cream and garnished with a peppermint stick and crushed candy cane sugar on the rim. I actually didn’t drink them, sweet drinks not being my thing, but Kory did, and I can vouch that they’re sort of fun.
We made the Christmas Kidtini version for the kids the next night: a mint chip shake + green food coloring, garnished with candy canes and red sugar on the rim.
We still haven’t made the milk punch, or any cookies, or candy…but we are slowly but surely finding some Christmas spirit.
